


Ghosts and Demons

by sinfuldesire_archivist



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Season/Series 01
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2006-06-14
Updated: 2006-06-14
Packaged: 2018-09-03 20:30:21
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,690
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8729032
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sinfuldesire_archivist/pseuds/sinfuldesire_archivist
Summary: Set immediately after Pilot.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Note from the Sinful Desire archivists: this story was originally archived at [Sinful-Desire.org](http://fanlore.org/wiki/Sinful_Desire). To preserve the archive, we began importing its works to the AO3 as an Open Doors-approved project in November 2016. We e-mailed all creators about the move and posted announcements, but may not have reached everyone. If you are (or know) this creator, please contact us using the e-mail address on [Sinful Desire collection profile](http://archiveofourown.org/collections/sinfuldesire/profile).

Ghosts and Demons

**Title** \- Ghosts and Demons  
**Pairing** \- Sam/Dean if you squint  
**Size** \- 9K  
**Spoilers** \- set immediately after Pilot  
**Warning** \- Well. It's not _exactly_ slash, though, I'd be hard-pressed to call it Gen. Nothing explicit, but in my head it's slash so I'll slap an incest warning on here just in case.  
  
  
  
  
  
_**Ghosts and Demons**_  
  
  
Sam was pretty sure he would have tanked the interview anyway. Well, maybe not tanked, but as much as Sam had just wanted things to be normal - had wanted a normal job and a normal life with a normal girl - sometimes he had a really hard time actually believing he could _have_ that.   
  
When Sam went off to school he knew he wasn't ever going home again; he didn't need his dad to tell him not to come back. Sam didn't _want_ to go back, not that anyone understood that. Dad was pissed off and disappointed that Sam didn't want to spend the rest of his life chasing down ghosts and demons, and Dean just…didn't get it.   
  
Dean never understood that Sam wanted more, wanted something different, and the day Sam left he just watched him with what passed for serious on him and didn't even say goodbye. There were no secrets as to where Sam was going, but it was understood that if he was leaving, Dad and Dean weren't going after him.   
  
School was something different than anything Sam had ever known, but maybe he was more normal than he had realized because surprisingly he managed to get along just fine after the first few weeks. It took him a little while to realize that guys his age weren't looking for spirits hiding in the shadows every night and instead that they were going out getting tanked or watching football and obsessed with hitting on girls. When Sam met Jess he couldn't believe his luck.   
  
Jess wasn't the type of girl Sam had ever thought would even know he was alive, but when he asked for her phone number that first night at The Latern, she actually gave it to him. Even more surprising was when he called her the next day she actually picked up and instead of screening his calls and agreed to a date. Dean was right when he said it; Jess was totally out of his league, but she seemed to never notice (or if she did, she never minded), and Sam let himself think - just for a minute - that maybe this was it. The start of his normal life.  
  
Which apparently it wasn't. Tonight proved that more than anything.   
  
You couldn't be raised the way he and Dean were and then just pick up and leave. Move someplace else, go to school, and forget the fact that you were trained to hunt ghosts and used to sleep with a .45 under your pillow since the time you were nine.   
  
Sam had thought that he put all of that life behind him. (Okay. Maybe he never really believed that. Maybe he only hoped.) Whenever someone at school asked why he didn't go home over the holidays he'd just say "family problems" or claimed that he'd go home another time when he knew damn well he wouldn't. Jess knew he had a brother, but until the night that Dean showed up and started punching the hell out of him in the middle of his own living room, she'd never met him, had no idea what he looked like. Now Jess was dead and Sam was in the passenger seat of Dean's old hunk of crap car, driving down a deserted highway in the middle of the night.   
  
AC/DC played loudly from the radio, and Sam rolled his eyes and reached out to flick the stereo off.   
  
"Hey, what do you-"  
  
"It's late, Dean," Sam said, cutting him off. "We should stop."  
  
Dean shook his head. "If I drive straight through we can be to dad by-"  
  
"It wont make a difference if we get there at six or nine." Sam shook his head. "And believe it or not-"  
  
Dean grinned at him. "Not."  
  
"I'd like to get there in one piece," Sam finished, talking right over him. "So if you could pull the car over?"  
  
It said a lot about how well Sam knew Dean that he knew Dean would argue. It said even more about how tired Dean was, when he actually did pull over a few more miles down the road.   
  
"All right, Sammy," Dean said, with the tone in his voice that he really didn't want to do this; he was only doing it to humor Sam. Which was a crock of shit, but Sam was too tired to even argue about it. He just wanted to _stop_.   
  
Dean drove the car a little off the highway, the uneven ground jostling the wheels as he drove into the woods at the edge of the road. Sam squeezed his eyes shut for a second, but all he could see was Jess. Jess and flames, and it brought back every memory of every single body, every ghost, every drop of blood Sam had ever seen. He didn't want to be doing this again. He didn't _want_ to be doing this again, but like usual, what Sam wanted didn't seem to matter for shit.  
  
Sam opened his eyes when Dean killed the headlights and turned off the engine. He looked over his shoulder; he could see a jacket and papers and one stray glove lying on the floor. There was crap strewn all over the floorboards, and when Sam shifted in his seat an empty soda bottle cracked under his boot. "Did I tell you how much I liked your car?" Sam asked.   
  
"Shut up," Dean told him, before running his hand over the steering wheel. "There, there," he cooed. Sam rolled his eyes again. "He doesn't mean it, baby."  
  
"It's good you're nice to the car," Sam muttered. "It's probably as much action as you're going to get." He shoved his hands through his hair and leaned his head back against the seat. "You woo many girls with all that _charm_ you got there, Dean?"  
  
They were both silent after that, and when Dean finally spoke it was to completely ignore Sam's dig. "You don't have to do this if you don't want to, Sam. You weren't _going_ to do this."  
  
"Things changed." Sam closed his eyes, and there she was again. Jess. Up on the ceiling but this time a memory pricked at the edge of his brain. Something whispered: _You've seen this before._ "I don't think I have a choice," he finished quietly.   
  
Dean made a sound low in his throat and moved so he was sitting closer to Sam on the seat. A few minutes passed, and then Sam opened his eyes and looked out the window.   
  
"This reminds me of when we were little," Sam said. He could feel Dean move his head to look at him, but he didn't say anything and Sam didn't look back. "We used to want to camp out in the backyard - all the way at the back, remember? Where all the trees started-"  
  
"But dad never let us go alone," Dean finished for him. "And when he did-"  
  
"He made us bring our monitors," Sam continued, and how had he not realized he missed this so much? How he missed talking to Dean, finishing each other's sentences, each one talking over the other. Sam slid down and leaned his head against Dean's shoulder, his jacket soft on Sam's skin. "And our guns, of course" Sam said, letting his eyes slip closed as Dean leaned into him more.  
  
"We were the only kids on the block that had a poltergeist in our backyard, Sammy." It was just like it always was. Dean talking to him, his hand in Sam's hair. The sound of Dean's voice calming Sam down when everything - the ghosts, their dad, the world - seemed to be against him, just like when they were little. "Don't tell me the guns weren't necessary."  
  
And they were; Sam knew that as much as he hated (had always hated) to admit it. Just like they were necessary now. "Yeah," Sam said.   
  
Everything came around to where it started. Everything old got new again. Start the way you mean to go on, and when your life starts with the only woman you had ever loved killed before your eyes, it only makes sense that it would continue on a wayward path .   
  
"How did you know to come back?" Sam asked. The more he thought about what happened than night, the more questions he had. He didn't realize it at first, but Dean had already driven away. Dean was gone when Sam went into the apartment, and a few minutes passed between Sam getting home and seeing Jess. "What made you-"  
  
"I could feel it," Dean said. Sam could feel his shoulder tensing under Sam's cheek. "I knew something was wrong."  
  
Sam just nodded because that made no sense, but it made all the sense in the world. Dean didn't need him - he never had. Dean was good at this. He knew things, _got_ things that no one else did, and whenever Sam really needed him, Dean would be there.  
  
The more Sam thought about it, the more he realized that they could handle this. He and Dean _did_ make a good team, like Dean said, and they _would_ find dad and figure out what was going on. Maybe it wasn't the life Sam had hoped for, but deep down he knew it was the one he was always expecting.  
  
That was for tomorrow, though. Now, Sam was tired. He wanted to close his eyes and get some sleep and mourn Jess as best he could in this worst case scenario life. He wanted to forget about the interview he was missing and the school he'd never finish and the normal job he'd never have. He wanted to just stay here in Dean's car and fall asleep with the trees above them and his cheek pressed against his brother's shoulder.  
  
  
##


End file.
